A philosopher’s take on NZ’s bill to define who counts as a woman or man
The test that determines what gets written on a birth certificate is a visual inspection of…
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Koala numbers crashed across Australia 100,000 years ago. Global glacial cycles are likely to blame
It’s surprising how easy it is to see a koala every day in Australia’s major cities….
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Male bowerbirds hope to dazzle females with bright human-made items
When the team returned to the sites, they determined which decorations had been selected from the…
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Rare male red pipefish carrying eggs on its trunk spotted in Sydney
The red pipefish (Notiocampus ruber) is a rare relative of seahorses and seadragons found only in…
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Mosquitoes learn to link the smell of DEET with a blood meal – new study
Mosquito repellents are key to protect ourselves from mosquito bites and the pathogens they might carry….
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500-million-year-old fossil helps fill a strange gap in our record of life on Earth
Roughly 500 million years ago, a strange event in the evolution of life on Earth seems…
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Whatever the mirror test tells us, beluga whales pass it
In hours of underwater video footage from a New York aquarium, a beluga whale named Natasha…
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Squeak up! I can’t hear you: pilot whales are shouting to hear themselves over ship noise
In the Strait of Gibraltar – a famous marine road connecting the Mediterranean and the Atlantic…
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The science of how fireflies stay in sync
The team found that even a small number of interacting males can synchronize their flashes, but…
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How ‘looksmaxxing’ self-improvement apps are marketing misogyny to young men
A theory about male “sexual market value” that began in online manosphere forums is now appearing…
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An illegal bioweapons lab was found in a Las Vegas garage. It’s a warning for Australia
In Las Vegas last week, two people were admitted to hospital “deathly ill” after being exposed…
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AI is failing ‘Humanity’s Last Exam’. So what does that mean for machine intelligence?
How do you translate ancient Palmyrene script from a Roman tombstone? How many paired tendons are…
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Great white sharks grow a whole new kind of tooth for slicing bone as they age
A great white shark is a masterwork of evolutionary engineering. These beautiful predators glide effortlessly through…
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Red flowers have a ‘magic trait’ to attract birds and keep bees away
For flowering plants, reproduction is a question of the birds and the bees. Attracting the right…
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Why are human penises so large? New evolutionary study finds two main reasons
“Size matters” sounds like a tabloid cliché, but for evolutionary biologists the size of the human…
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The evolution of expendability: Why some ants traded armor for numbers
“Ants reduce per-worker investment in one of the most nutritionally expensive tissues for the good of…
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Why are some people extremely competitive while others are so chill?
If you’ve ever been on the sidelines at an under-12’s team sport, you will know that…
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Some stinkbugs’ legs carry a mobile fungal garden
Many insect species hear using tympanal organs, membranes roughly resembling our eardrums but located on their…
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Why do giraffes have such long legs? Animal simulations reveal a surprising answer
If you’ve ever wondered why the giraffe has such a long neck, the answer seems clear:…
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Neural network finds an enzyme that can break down polyurethane
You’ll often hear plastic pollution referred to as a problem. But the reality is that it’s…
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High-tech cameras capture the secrets of venomous snake bites
For more than 60 million years, venomous snakes have slithered across Earth. These ancient, chemical weapon-wielding…
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And then there were none: Australia’s only shrew declared extinct
For many years the Christmas Island shrew prospered. When European naturalists first visited Christmas Island in…
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Termite farmers fine-tune their weed control
Odontotermes obesus is one of the termite species that grows fungi, called Termitomyces, in their mounds….
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Mysterious molecule found on brown dwarf casts further doubt on potential signs of life on Venus
At this stage, they conclude with a simple statement: there is no consistent model that explains…
